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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jon_Dahl" data-source="post: 6073763" data-attributes="member: 89822">Within the game-mechanics, how would you resolve the following dialogue?"Let us in. We want to check your house.""What?! Hell no!""Please reconsider.""NO!""Ok, bye then."(end of conversation)I see a few glaring problems with the diplomacy skill:1. It requires at least a one minute of conversation. Sometimes a player briefly explains the situation (maybe a 2-3 fullround actions) and then easily gives up with the conversation. The minimum timeframe is not reached.2. Sometimes it's hard to know if they are trying to bluff, negotiate or intimidate. We can't roll all this at once.3. It's hard to know if I should ask for a rushed diplomacy check (-10) or a standard one.In my game the players need to investigate a house for secret doors. This is crucial for the campaign and I can easily compare this to a dungeon crawl and the moment where the players first enter the dungeon; if they don't enter the dungeon, there is no dungeon crawl. Searching for secret doors from the house is the nexus of the adventure.At the moment, there's a family living in the house and they're not too keen on having stangers in the house. You can imagine if somewhere knocked on your door and asked to check your house. It's really not that appealing.I have made an effort to minimize railroading. You can negotiate with the husband or the wife or with both (or intimidate them or bluff them), or you can sneak into the house or you can use magic or you come with a ruse in order to have the house cleared. Also an NPC offers the players a chance to use forged documents to pose as members of the city guard and investigate the house.But in this case the players went over to the house and asked a few questions from the man. The husband answered them. Then the party spokesman asked to enter the house but he said "no". After that the group went back to the tavern and will not investigate the case any further.Now I don't know if I should somehow railroad them to the adventure or should I just accept the fact that they don't want to investigate the house. They have plenty of ways to do it and since the whole group is exclusively of the neutral alignment, it shouldn't be against their alignment to use underhanded methods to investigate the house.</blockquote>

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